Conor O'Clery - Moscow, December 25, 1991

The day of the conference, February 25, 1986, was clear and bitterly cold, with the temperature hovering around zero. Inside the conference hall the new general secretary got a warm reception from the 5,000 delegates. They expected much from the dynamic new leader after the stagnation of the previous two decades.

At this, the Twenty-seventh Party Congress, Gorbachev launched his ambitious reform program to revitalize the Soviet economy. He called it perestroika, or restructuring. Its aim was to renew Soviet-style socialism through greater freedom for initiative and to liberalize society through glasnost, or openness.

Gorbachev had worked on his speech to the congress for several days at his holiday dacha in Pitsunda, with the help of his close collaborator, Alexander Yakovlev. A heavy-jowled, balding man in his late sixties, with large plasticrimmed glasses and his left knee stiff from a war wound, Yakovlev provided much of the intellectual drive for perestroika. Gorbachev had met him in May 1983, when he visited Canada, where Yakovlev was semi-exiled as Soviet ambassador after speaking out against Russian chauvinism.

In fact perestroika could be traced back to a long and frank discussion Gorbachev and Yakovlev held in the backyard of a farm in Amherstburg, Ontario. [34] 1 Shulgan, The Soviet Ambassador, 265-267. The ambassador told him there how the Canadian system was superior because openness and democracy acted as a check on corruption. Yakovlev so impressed Gorbachev as a liberal but loyal party theoretician that he had him brought back to Moscow and made a candidate member of the Politburo. Behind the scenes the former ambassador urged his comrade to think dangerous thoughts, like splitting the party in two, holding elections, and lifting censorship on the press.

Raisa listened to the discussions that day in Pitsunda and participated, chiding them for ignoring the plight of women and the family in Soviet society.

When he took the podium at the congress, Gorbachev lectured the delegates on the need to combat corruption and inertia. He promised that with perestroika, living conditions would improve and consumer goods would become more available. He spoke of “new thinking” in international relations, meaning noninterference in other countries’ domestic affairs, and said that Moscow must turn away from the policy of military confrontation with the West. He made it clear that everything that was not forbidden by law was to be allowed, reversing the unwritten rule that everything not expressly allowed was prohibited.

He also called a halt to the party habit of delivering panegyrics to the general secretary and shortly afterwards cut short lavish words of praise from Eduard Shevardnadze, whom he had appointed foreign minister, earning a round of amused applause. Party hacks nevertheless queued at the microphone to herald the new leader’s wisdom.

When Boris Yeltsin reached the podium, everyone expected another paean of praise for perestroika. However, like the schoolboy taking on the teacher, he criticized one of the “zones beyond criticism”—the secret privileges enjoyed by party members. His few months in Moscow had made him aware of the level of public resentment over this system of lavish perks. “Let a leader go to an ordinary store and stand in line there, like everyone else,” he boomed. “Then perhaps the queues, of which everyone is sick and tired, will disappear sooner.”

There was consternation. This was a particularly sensitive subject. Many of the delegates had secured their high positions in the party specifically to improve the quality of their lives by not having to go to ordinary stores and queue with everyone else.

Special privileges for Communist Party members had long been a fixed part of Soviet society. The party compensated its leaders generously for their “services to the people,” according to a rigid system called the Table of Ranks that mimicked a formal list of positions and ranks in tsarist Russia.

At the top, the members of the Politburo and the top party secretariat, some twenty-five in number, were free to use a special squadron of Ilyushin-62 long-range jetliners and Tupolev-134 twin-engine airliners to fly anywhere they wanted. Each was allocated four personal bodyguards, a large Zil limousine equipped with a radio telephone, and a state-owned country house with cooks, waitresses, and gardeners, as well as free time-shares in luxurious state holiday dachas at Black Sea resorts. Volga sedans were provided for members’ wives, with drivers on twenty-four-hour call and Kremlin number plates that made militiamen snap to attention. [35] 2 Dobrynin, In Confidence, 621-622.

Everything was paid for by the KGB’s Ninth Directorate, a 40,000-strong uniformed bodyguard for party leaders and their families, which also operated a separate government-party telephone system. A spouse could order a bodyguard to get presents, pick up a tailor for a fitting, or do the shopping. Other grades of party members received packages of choice foodstuffs delivered from “special” shops closed to outsiders. Thousands of middle- and lower-ranking apparatchiks had access to different levels of supplies from private stores and to treatment in special medical clinics.

The system ensured loyalty. The fact that everything belonged to the state and could be withdrawn at a moment’s notice was a disincentive for a cadre to express dissent.

Yeltsin himself gained from the fountain of party benefits. When he became a candidate member of the Politburo, he was assigned a magnificent state dacha, Moskva-reka-5, situated by the river in the village of Usovo, northwest of the capital. It had just been vacated by Gorbachev, who had moved to an even more sumptuous country mansion built to his specifications. When Yeltsin went to inspect his new home, he was met by the commander of the bodyguard, who introduced him to a bevy of cooks, maids, security guards, and gardeners. The former provincial party chief was overwhelmed by the palatial rooms with marble paneling, parquet floors, crystal lighting, an enormous glass-roofed veranda, a home cinema, a billiards room, and a “kitchen big enough to feed an army.” The commander, beaming with delight, asked Yeltsin what he thought of it. The Moscow party chief would say later that he mumbled something inarticulate, while his wife and daughters, Tanya, age twenty-five, and Yelena, age twentyeight, were too overcome and depressed to reply. “Chiefly we were shattered by the senselessness of it all.” Nevertheless, he moved in right away, even before the nails were removed from the walls where Gorbachev’s pictures had hung.

The former Sverdlovsk boss had plunged with zeal into the role of first secretary of the Moscow Communist Party. He believed Gorbachev “knew my character and no doubt felt certain I would be able to clear away the old debris, to fight the mafia, and that I was tough enough to carry out a wholesale cleanup of the personnel.” During the first year of perestroika, he and Gorbachev spoke occasionally. They had a dedicated telephone line to each other. As one of the KGB officers assigned to guard the Moscow party chief, Alexander Korzhakov got the impression that Yeltsin “worshipped” Gorbachev, noting how he would rush to pick up the special handset when it rang.

Yeltsin found that the task of reviving Moscow, the center of the intellectual, cultural, scientific, business, and political life of the country, was impossible under the failing command system. Moreover, he came to the conclusion that his predecessor Viktor Grishin had been an “empty bladder” who had corrupted the Moscow party organization.

The city was in a wretched state. Everywhere there was “dirt, endless queues, overcrowded public transport,” he observed. The vegetable warehouses in particular were a scandal, full of rotting produce, rats, and cockroaches. Sorting and packing was done by resentful squads of citizens dragooned into service.